Okay forgive me for being a little behind the times, but I have been offline for a while with moving house and having a sdpat with my last ISP over bandwidth.

Apple using Intel from next year! Are they wise?
The next generation consoles are gonna use PowerPC, errr I can only imagin this is because neither Sony nor Microsoft could find anything faster, why oh why are Apple shooting themselves in the foot by switching to intel? Maybe they are gonna get a deal on the junk chips intel were hoping would go in the new consoles. LOL
Seriously though people might well look at these new boxes and wonder hmmmm this baby is fast, can I get a PowerPC PC? But alas they won't be buying Macs to do so. As for Intel "looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor roadmap by far" 'Steve jobs' again errrrr I have looked at the reviews of Intel chips, I have read details on Athlon 64's and since I got Debian for AMD 64 I can catergorically state Intel are not strongest. Yes I have ranted about the Ath 64 elsewhere, but I must stress that if you re-read those carefully my gripe was the legacy part, not the leading edge longmode.
As for this roadmap, look carefully Jobs, it's written onn the back of a napkin after reading reviews of Athlons If intel really had a longterm plan why are they playing catchup? Come on you don't plan to be second, which Intel clearly are given they have had a decided lack of forethought. AMD brought more 'into' the die, Intel never even thought of it! Accordingly AMD will continue to outperform Intel on lower clock speeds, Intel... Ack I could go on but it's getting late.....

As I understand it, the problem with going for AMD, is that they do not have the necessary production capacity, nor are they likely to within a suitable time frame to meet Apple's projected requirements.

I can see huge problems with this too - getting further information out of Apple is worse than squeezing blood from stone. They haven't even stated if it is x86 64-bit or how they are going to restrict this to Apple sold hardware. I have even told Apple (Australia) that if this is 32-bit they are going backwards 10 years! I'm doing the OS X Tiger Server certification course at Apple in 4-weeks and will definitely be asking more questions.

I've been reading the discussions on this on various Mac forums, and few very good reasons to switch have come up...

1. Laptops. The PowerPC G5 processor runs far too hot to be used in a laptop. PowerBooks are starting to look very sad compared to machines built around the Centrino chipset - Apple does not want to bomb out of this rapidly growing market.

2. Consoles. IBM is ramping up production of chips for Microsoft and Sony. Apple are a very small fish in comparison. Where do you think IBM's major development is going to go - Apple's chips or the console ones ?

3. That PowerPC based console chip - apparently it has been tweaked to make it very fast for the sort of things that consoles need to do, resulting in a performance drop for general purpose computing. Rumour is it won't be that fast outside of a console game. I guess we'll find out when the PS3 ships, as I've read rumours that some form of Linux will ship with it...

To be honest, I don't think it will matter what chip is inside - it'll still be an Apple, still treading a slightly different path from the rest of the computing world and still drop-dead gorgeous to look at. And still more expensive than an equivalent powered Wintel box. People who like Apple will still buy them.
What it might mean is that there are some better deals available on PowerPC based Macs over the next 18 months or so - I hope so, I'm planning to buy one later this year